Saturday, 10 June 2017

Swallowing Bones

I’ve just finished running The Bone Swallower, a one-shot urban fantasy investigation using Fate Accelerated set in what we have called Other London. The players were members of Desk 17, responsible for investigating “other” crimes, and they had a missing person to chase down.

Overall, the game was a success. I had a good time, and from what I could tell my two players enjoyed themselves, there was some good banter between the players and also the NPCs.

Anyway, here are some thoughts.

Setting: I loved running a game in Other London. The setting was originally created by my good friend Jon Freeman (and Jon was one of my players this time around). Back when he created it (in the late 90s I think) it probably would have been considered unusual, but these days London-based urban fantasies are everywhere. Anyway I really enjoyed playing in Other London and creating my own, slightly weird urban fantasy.

Jon tells me that he found it interesting seeing my take on characters he had created (I reused some that I had encountered previously), and he was kind enough not to criticise me for doing it wrong.

(And I’ve only just realised that I put a green witch into Greenwich. That pleases me.)

Pregens: My players seemed to like the pre-generated characters that I’d created. I designed the pregens so that the players could tailor them to suit (partly inspired by these). My experience is that allowing the players to tailor the characters gives them more ownership than they might otherwise have.

The only problem is that the players chose neither of the two combat-facing characters, and I knew that there was combat coming up. (I prepared the scenario assuming that I would have four players, giving them five characters to choose from there would always be one fighter.) It wasn’t a huge problem, as I just dialled down the difficulty of their opponents.

Timing: It wasn’t a real test of the scenario, but it took too long to play. We completed it in four sessions. Each of our online sessions is two hours long (I’m strict about finishing on time as we play on a school night), and in that two hours there’s a bit of chatter and catching up, so we didn’t play for eight solid hours. Probably more like 6-7.

Most convention games are fairly linear, and as an occult investigation I’d planned a clue trail and various scenes. However, to hide its linearity I'd thought out some alternative routes and some optional scenes. The players didn’t need to visit every scene, but because I was happy to let them go where they wanted to, they did end up in a couple of scenes I would have skipped if we'd been at a convention.

Overall, we ended up running nine scenes (with two combats). I think I could drop three scenes easily - but balanced against will be having more players. Will more players make the scenario run quicker or slower? I don’t know and I need to test.

One thing I can do is plan out how long I expect the scenes to take, and try and keep to schedule. I’ve never done that as a GM, so that will be interesting to try.

Fate Accelerated: I like the simplicity of Fate Accelerated, but even having played it a fair bit I still struggle with approaches. I’m finding it hard to unlearn skills.

The other challenge I have with Fate is that I often forget to use my GM’s Fate tokens. I need to get better at that. I should probably give myself a rule to use them as soon as I can in a scene, rather than save them and end up not using them.

Online Play: I don’t know if this is normal, but every time I’ve played online we’ve typically had 3-4 drop outs each session, where one player has to log back in. It doesn’t seem to matter which system we’re using (we’ve used Skype, Google hangouts, Facebook messenger).

But other than that, online play has been ideal, particularly when we’re located in different parts of the country. (But it will never replace face-to-face play…)

What next for The Bone Swallower? I need to run it again, probably at GoPlayLeeds. And if that works then I will run it at Furnace or Continuum or both. And at some point I will make it available in some format or other.

What next for Other London? We enjoyed The Bone Swallower so much that we’ve already started on the next case: Murder of a Templar.